Terrorism is way, way down, except in countries torn apart by civil war, often where the US has sent occupying troops

Some aftereffects of the US attack on Libya:

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The problem IMHO is there is no clear solution.

  1. Pull out or don’t get invovled, accused of not caring. Also, gives terrorist more ability to do what they want.

  2. Get directly invovled and get accused of imperialism. I wish that if the US was being accused of that we would at least act like it, and literally take over and seize control, put in an American as the leader, and seize all the assets and ship them back home. Maybe I could get a nice rug out of the deal. Or heroin.

  3. Half ass it and waste a lot of time and lives and not make any thing better.

Like I said, a lot of the issues can be traced to the British and other people carving things up and ignoring old borders and cultures. All of that was definitely bad. Unfortunately, the most stable regions are also dictatorships and monarchies. Unfortunately we still need to buy some of their resources, thus we are going to have to have relations with those leaders. We naively thought taking down some dictators and oppressive authoritarian regimes would awaken the cradle of civilization into a new democratic era.

The reality is, even if we poofed the US out of the area, there would still be wars and conflicts. Even with out ISIS there is Syria and the Saudis vs Yemen, plus the Kurds wanting independence, plus even more issues across the Middle East and Africa. Certainly one can point out America’s and other outsiders actions as to WHY we are where were are - but what is the solution?

As a side note, our eventual back stabbing of Saddam and Qaddafi and others are exactly why North Korea is making sure that won’t happen to them.

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Yep. Schoolgirls get kidnapped in Africa, civilians get gassed in Syria…hashtag campaigns result in absolutely no one being rescued. Draw a “red line” and then back away from it, you look like a helpless ditherer.

I’m totally in favor of the USA getting out of these fights in which no national interest of ours is at stake - but when we take that route, we need to learn that the USA can do nothing about it, and get good and used to that.

Oh very yes. This, to several orders of magnitude.

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Where would you put the U.S. in that categorization?

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A small and incomplete sample of recent imperial benevolence:

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Let’s have some imperial history while we’re at it:

Horrible background music on that second one, but good content. Skip to 7:50 to get just the key part.

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Thanks for the info. I guess maybe they consider the ethnic cleansing and terrorist attacks in Kosovo and other former Easter Bloc states more “legitimate warfare activities”, than they do with the factions of ISIS and the like. I am guessing.

Isn’t this a consequence of asymmetrical warfare? There is no point for third-world insurgents to confront US forces in the open, in a peer-to-peer battle. The technological advantage makes conventional warfare suicidal. You could also say that “terrorism” grew in areas of Europe occupied by the Nazis and their allies. Not the fault of the occupied, but of the occupiers.

Perhaps having the US and allied forces in those Muslim countries reduces the number of attacks at home, with our service members acting as the sacrificial metal that protects the people back home but, if so, it is done at a unjustifiable, huge human cost to the societies of the countries in which our forces are deployed.

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Except in Iraq, which had a relatively low incidence of terrorist attacks until we invaded it. We invaded Iraq not because of terrorism, but because of alleged weapons of mass destruction. Even if you isolate attacks on military targets and consider those legitimate warfare, you still have to consider that the rate of attacks on civilian targets skyrocketed after our invasion.

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That was the cover story, anyway.

We invaded Iraq for oil. Twice.

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Transcript of the last bit of that second video:

List of American wars, with a link to an interactive timeline:

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Do you have enough ink to start printing out the conflicts of just the top 5 populous European countries? Even just starting from 1775.

War is as old as man and everyone able to wage it does so. If he finds recent history mind boggling, he better not crack open a history on Medieval European wars. Holy cow. If they had printing presses they would have had to make score cards to keep track of the ever fluxing borders. That is just the fairly well documented stuff. Our full scope of early history is sketchy, and pre history lost. Even what we know about the Americas per-Columbian was awash in constant ebbs and flows. It makes all those petty skirmishes and incidents on the lists look trivial by comparison.

But overall we are making pretty solid strides. Western Europe hasn’t had a significant war since WWII, and Eastern Europe while not totally peaceful, is doing much better. Even the Middle East and Africa which are current hot spots, are still relatively cool. Japan hasn’t waged a war in a long time, and even the sleeping dragon, China, while continuing to expand its military are keeping mostly out of direct conflict. Overall our population world wide is growing, death from war is at a historic low percentage wise, and the percentage of people above the poverty line is at an all time high.

Here is another thing, when one asks “Just think about how many of those conflicts killed real people and changed the course of history. How many of them affect the way you live today?..You never know. You never can know. It’s too much. There’s too much going on in that.”, perhaps also ask, “How many of the conflicts would have been different possibly for the worse with out US (or whomever) involvement?” Certainly not all of them, but some of them made things better through involvement. The people who have revolted like in Syria were often left with little choice for an alternative path. It would be nice to suggest there would be a non-violent path, but those opportunities don’t always present themselves.

That timeline is really neat, though.

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The graph line for “non-conflict countries” shows that the number of terrorist attacks is “way, way” (hyperbole) down from a record high, but still higher than average for at least the past ~20 years.

“… when you [conveniently] take those places out of the data, terrorism is way, way down worldwide.”

If you have to omit negative data to arrive at an optimistic conclusion, then you’re engaging in fantasy and/or obfuscation.

There have been zero terrorist attacks in my apartment; so, when taking all other places out of the data, the short upshot is that terrorism is at an all-time low worldwide! :rofl:

I suspect that you may be missing the point a bit.

It isn’t “the world is a wonderful place today”. It’s “terrorism is largely a product of civil war, which is itself substantially a product of foreign interference”.

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That would take quite a long time.

You seem to be addressing this as if you think that I am accusing the USA of being uniquely horrible amongst nations. That is not my argument.

Instead, it is this:

  1. Imperialism is destructive and evil. The British Empire was a massive crime; same goes for the Germans, Italians, French, Russians, Dutch, etc. etc.

  2. US imperialism is no exception to this.

  3. The USA has been the world’s leading imperialist for most of the last century, and has been a dominant unipolar hegemon for the last several decades. Ergo, most of the current imperialism-related harm is provided by the USA.

Cypher is a Gulf War veteran and academic historian, who specialises in military history. I am comfortable in his awareness of the history and nature of war.

Politically speaking, he appears to be a relatively conventional centrist Democrat, although he does own at least a dozen guns.

Inequality is sharply rising, fascism is on the march globally, the world is racing towards catastrophic environmental collapse and the USA is very obviously maneuvering to set up a Saudi-American attack on Iran.

That has been the excuse of empire for centuries.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper–
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard–
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:–
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Ye dare not stoop to less–
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Have done with childish days–
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

That poem was inspired by the Phillipine-American War, BTW. The one from the “Boondocks” video upthread. The one that involved concentration camps and genocide.

The consequences are there to see. Most of America’s wars were catastrophic for the people they were inflicted upon. A very large proportion of the interventions were “needed” because the USA had deliberately manufactured the chaos that justified them.

The history of US involvement in Latin America is utterly disgraceful.

https://twitter.com/public_cointel/status/932255311997685760

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What are the criteria? Is it as simple as saying that terrorists deliberately target civilians while freedom fighters don’t?

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BTW: this war is almost entirely unknown, yet utterly crucial to American history.

This is the war that gave you John Adam’s Sedition Act and aided the Haitian Revolution.

In turn, the success of the Haitian Revolution led to the Louisiana Purchase, which then fed into the genocide of Native America and sowing the seeds of the Civil War.

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It’s open-access; you can read the method section for yourself.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2053168017739757

For our analysis, we use data on terror events from the GTD. The GTD includes approximately 140,000 terror- ism events from 1970 to 2014 and is one of the most extensive sources of data on terrorist attacks.

The GTD is the Global Terrorism Database:

The discussion of how they developed the GTD criteria and where they source their data runs for several pages, but this is the basis of it:

PGIS defined terrorism as events involving ‘‘the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence to attain a political, economic, religious or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation.’’ Based on coding rules originally developed in 1970, the persons responsible for collecting the PGIS data excluded criminal acts that appeared to be devoid of any political or ideological motivation, and also acts arising from open combat between opposing armed forces, both regular and irregular. Data collectors also excluded actions taken by governments in the legitimate exercise of their authority, even when such actions were denounced by domestic and/or foreign critics as acts of ‘‘state terrorism.’’ However, they included violent acts that were not officially sanctioned by government, even in cases where many observers believed that the government was openly tolerating the violent actions. In sum, because the goal of the data collection was to provide risk assessment to corporate customers, the data base was designed to err on the side of inclusiveness. The justification was that being overly inclusive best served the interest of clients. An employee of a corporation about to move to Colombia would be concerned about acts of violence against civilians and foreigners, regardless of whether these acts were domestic rather than international, threatened rather than completed, or carried out for religious rather than political purposes.

&

In the data collection for GTD2, the Criteria Committee responded to these weaknesses of the earlier PGIS data collection by establishing three criteria that had to be met before an event could be classified as terrorist: (1) The incident must be intentional—the result of a conscious calculation on the part of a perpetrator (2) The incident must entail some level of violence (including violence against property) or the threat of violence. And (3) there must be sub-national perpetrators. That is, at the time of the incident, the perpetrator group must not be exercising sovereignty (unequivocal, stable control of demarcated territory; functioning governmental structures). Otherwise it becomes a ‘‘state’’ group and its actions are either state terrorism or covert actions against another sovereign territory and in either case are excluded.

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